Cold Peace

Abstract

Disorder erupted in Ukraine in 2014, involving the overthrow of a sitting government, the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and a violent insurrection, supported by Moscow, in the east of the country.

This Adelphi book argues that the crisis has yielded a ruinous outcome, in which all the parties are worse off and international security has deteriorated. This negative-sum scenario resulted from years of zero-sum behaviour on the part of Russia and the West in post-Soviet Eurasia, which the authors rigorously analyse. The rivalry was manageable in the early period after the Cold War, only to become entrenched and bitter a decade later. The upshot has been systematic losses for Russia, the West and the countries caught in between.

All the governments involved must recognise that long-standing policies aimed at achieving one-sided advantage have reached a dead end, Charap and Colton argue, and commit to finding mutually acceptable alternatives through patient negotiation.

Notes

1 Phrase taken from the foundational argument about geo-economics in Edward N. Luttwak, ‘From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce’, National Interest, no. 20, Summer 1990, pp. 17–23.

2 Lest this triad sound overly rationalistic, we concede that nonrational variables – such as arrogance, bureaucratic red tape, carelessness and sloth – also entered into the picture we describe. We are grateful to Neil MacFarlane for drawing our attention to this point. Our take, though, is that these factors were at work on all sides and did not tip the outcome in any one direction.

3 ‘Text of Havel’s Speech to Congress’, 22 February 1990, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/02/22/text-of-havels-speech-to-congress/df98e177-778e-4c26-bd96-980089c4fcb2/.

4 James Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995), p. 158.

5 Ibid., p. 247.

6 George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 205–6.

7 Gorbachev quoted in Milan Svec, ‘The Prague Spring: 20 Years Later’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 55, no. 5, Summer 1988 , pp. 981–1001.

8 Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 91. Interestingly this heroic multinationalism, as Sarotte tags it, was also the dream of the socialistic dissidents who helped bring down East German Communism, and of liberal oppositionists in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

9 Within the Western alliance, Margaret Thatcher’s British government and, less so, François Mitterrand’s government in Paris had reservations about reunification but went along with it.

10 The sequence in which this was done was quite complex. For the details, see Mary Elise Sarotte, ‘Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment Toward NATO Enlargement in February 1990′, Diplomatic History, vol. 34, no. 1, January 2010, pp. 119–40.

11 Gorbachev ran the proposition of the Soviet Union joining NATO by George Bush later that month and in July, this time severing it from German unification. See Sarotte, 1989, chap. 5; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, pp. 251–2; Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 280; James Baker, ‘Russia in NATO?’, Washington Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, Winter 2002, p. 102.

12 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, pp. 300–1.

13 ‘Charter of Paris for a New Europe’, 1990, http://www.osce.org/mc/39516?download=true.

14 Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, pp. 173, 196.

15 Bill Keller, ‘Gorbachev, in Finland, Disavows Any Right of Regional Intervention’, New York Times, 26 October 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/26/world/gorbachev-in-finland-disavows-any-right-of-regional-intervention.html.

16 Gorbachev and Kissinger quoted in Bennett Kovrig, Of Walls and Bridges: The United States & Eastern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1991), p. 360.

17 Stephen Kux, ‘Neutrality and New Thinking’, in Roger E. Kanet, Deborah Nutter Miner and Tamara J. Resler (eds), Soviet Foreign Policy in Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 110–13. The papers in this collection were written for an academic conference in 1990. By the time they came out, there was of course no such thing as Soviet foreign policy.

18 The treaty restoring Austria, under occupation since 1945, as a sovereign state was signed by the Allied powers and the Austrian government in May 1955. The Soviets made it a condition of signing that neutrality be written into the constitution, which was done by act of parliament five months later. Kissinger specifically suggested an Austrian-type arrangement for Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. See Gerald B.H. Solomon, The NATO Enlargement Debate, 1990–1997: Blessings of Liberty (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1998), p. 8. For broader discussion, see Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Empire’s Demise and the International System’, in Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen (eds), International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 155–6.

19 Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, ‘Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion', International Security, vol. 40, no. 4, Spring 2016, pp. 7–44; Baker quotation at p. 30. A well-argued alternative interpretation is Mark Kramer, ‘The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia’, Washington Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, April 2009, pp. 39–61.

20 ‘It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.’ Maxim Korshunov, ‘Mikhail Gorbachev: I Am against All Walls’, Russia Beyond the Headlines, 16 October 2014, http://rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbachev_i_am_against_all_walls_40673.html.

21 Shifrinson, ‘Deal or No Deal?’, p. 40. Shifrinson also documents (p. 38) that some working-level officials in the Department of State and Pentagon penned briefs as soon as October 1990 about the desirability of keeping NATO's door ajar and ‘not [giving] the East Europeans the impression that NATO is forever a closed club’.

22 Sarotte, 1989, p. 200.

23 Ibid., pp. 200–1.

24 Mary Elise Sarotte, ‘A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow about NATO Expansion’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 93, no. 5, September/ October 2014, p. 97. Sarotte has written that this was done ‘by design’. We agree that one effect of the institutional design adopted at the time was to place Russia on Europe's periphery, but we do not see this as the intended result.

25 Along with Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were founding members. Georgia did not join until 1993.

26 The three Baltic states had been independent countries between the world wars. The United States had never recognised their annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940.

27 Belarus and Ukraine had formally been members of the UN since 1945, despite their subordination to the Soviet government in Moscow.

28 Strobe Talbott, Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 94.

29 Ibid.

30 The report was published in ‘Perspektivy rasshireniya NATO i interesy Rossii: Doklad Sluzhby vneshnei razvedki’, Izvestiya, 25 November 1993. For a summary, see Steven Erlanger, ‘Russia Warns NATO on Expanding East’, New York Times, 26 November 1993.

31 For the September letter, see Roger Cohen, ‘Yeltsin Opposes Expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe’, New York Times, 2 October 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/02/world/yeltsin-opposes-expansion-of-nato-in-eastern-europe.html.

32 ‘Interv’yu c ministrom inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii Andreem Kozyrevem', Rossiiskaya gazeta, 7 December 1993.

33 Quotations from a declassified memo of the conversation at ‘Secretary Christopher’s Meeting with President Yeltsin, 10/22/93, Moscow’, http://cdn.warontherocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Christopher-Yeltsin-1993-MemCon.pdf. See the discussion in James Goldgeier, ‘Promises Made, Promises Broken? What Yeltsin Was Told About NATO in 1993 and Why It Matters’, War on the Rocks, 12 July 2016, http://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-promises-broken-what-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-matters/.

34 ‘The President’s News Conference With Visegrad Leaders in Prague’, 12 January 1994, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=49832.

35 James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), p. 20.

36 Stephen Sestanovich, ‘Could It Have Been Otherwise?’, American Interest, vol. 10, no. 5, 2015, http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/04/14/could-it-have-been-otherwise/.

37 Goldgeier, Not Whether But When, pp. 169–70. Exhaustive accounts of the domestic politics of NATO enlargement (and the roles of politicians, business interests, think tanks and ethnic lobbies) can be found in these books: Ronald D. Asmus, Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2002); George W. Grayson, Strange Bedfellows: NATO Marches East (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999).

38 Quotations from Asmus, Opening NATO's Door, p. 192; Evgenii Primakov, Vstrechi na perekrestkakh (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2015), pp. 221–2.

39 Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, ‘The Unravelling of the Cold War Settlement’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 6, December 2009– January 2010, p. 51.

40 See the summary in Maksim Yusin, ‘Moskve ne udalos’ provesti perestroiku SBSE', Izvestiya, 12 October 1994.

41 Primakov, Vstrechi na perekrestkakh, p. 221.

42 ‘Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation Signed in Paris, France’, 27 May 1997, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm.

43 Hiski Haukkala, ‘Russian Reactions to the European Neighborhood Policy’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 55, no. 5, September 2008, pp. 40–8.

44 Sestanovich, ‘Could It Have Been Otherwise?’

45 Critics also brought up the central role of Russia and Boris Yeltsin in dismantling the Soviet regime. George F. Kennan in 1998 declared that expansion of the Alliance over Russia's objections was ‘turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime’. Quoted in Thomas L. Friedman, ‘Foreign Affairs; Now a Word from X’, New York Times, 2 May 1998.

46 The comment by Goldgeier in 1999 sums up this miscalculation: ‘Once the NATO–Russia Founding Act was signed … it was difficult for critics to make the case that Russia found enlargement unacceptable.’ Goldgeier, Not Whether But When, p. 172.

47 See Milada Anna Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

48 For more on the role of external powers here, see Alexander Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

49 In the European Union, for example, the French, British and Italian economies are roughly two-thirds the size of the German. In East Asia, China and Japan are about equal in economic strength. In the Western Hemisphere, the US economy, in current prices, is about seven times the size of the Brazilian economy and nine times the size of the Canadian.

50 David A. Lake, ‘The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Russian Empire: A Theoretical Interpretation’, in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott (eds), The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 54, 55.

51 Nunn–Lugar funds were also used to dispose of chemical and biological weapons. Russia participated in the programme until 2015. The negotiations with the Ukrainians are described in Graham Allison, ‘What Happened to the Soviet Superpower’s Nuclear Arsenal?’, Discussion Paper 2012, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, March 2012, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/3%2014%2012%20Final%20What%20Happened%20to%20Soviet%20Arsenals.pdf.

52 From the full text in Russian at ‘Strategicheskii kurs Rossii s gosudarstvami – uchastnikami Sodruzhestva Nezavisimykh Gosudarstv’, 14 September 1995, http://www.mid.ru/foreign_policy/official_documents/-/asset_publisher/CptICkB6BZ29/content/id/427752 (italics added). President Putin in 2005 nullified two minor articles of the decree, leaving the rest of it intact.

53 Quoted in Talbott, Russia Hand, p. 80.

54 Yevgeny Ambartsumov, quoted in Emil Pain, ‘Mezhnatsional’nye konflikty v politicheskoi igre', Nezavisimaya gazeta, 10 July 1992.

55 Quoted in ‘Chto bylo na nedele’, Kommersant, 6 March 1993.

56 For an early assessment, see Fiona Hill and Pamela Jewett, ‘“Back in the USSR”: Russia’s Intervention in the Internal Affairs of the Former Soviet Republics and the Implications for United States Policy Toward Russia’, Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, January 1994, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/Back%20in%20the%20USSR%201994.pdf.

57 Christoph Zürcher, The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 2007), p. 141.

58 ‘Remarks in a Town Meeting with Russian Citizens in Moscow’, 14 January 1994, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/WCPD-1994-01-24/pdf/WCPD-1994-01-24-Pg67.pdf.

59 For details on activities in Transnistria, see Rebecca Chamberlain-Creanga and Lyndon K. Allin, ‘Acquiring Assets, Debts, and Citizens: Russia and the Micro-Foundations of Transnistria’s Stalemated Conflict’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, vol. 18, no. 4, Fall 2010, pp. 329–56.

60 Daniel W. Drezner, The Sanctions Paradox: Economic Statecraft and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 131–248. See also Margarita Balmaceda, ‘Gas, Oil, and Linkages between Domestic and Foreign Policies: The Case of Ukraine’, Europe– Asia Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, March 1998, pp. 257–86; Tor Bukkvoll, ‘Off the Cuff Politics—Explaining Russia’s Lack of a Ukraine Strategy’, Europe–Asia Studies, vol. 53, no. 8, December 2001, pp. 1141–57; Margarita Balmaceda, Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

61 John P. Willerton and Mikhail A. Beznosov, ‘Russia’s Pursuit of Its Eurasian Security Interests: Weighing the CIS and Alternative Bilateral– Muiltilateral Arrangemnets’, in Katlijn Malfliet, Lien Verpoest and Evgeny Vinokurov (eds), The CIS, the EU and Russia: The Challenges of Integration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 50.

62 Taras Kuzio, ‘Geopolitical Pluralism in the CIS: The emergence of GUUAM’, European Security, vol. 9, no. 2, Summer 2000, p. 84.

63 Russia and Belarus further muddied the picture by forming a mostly fictional ‘union state’ in 1997.

64 The Ukrainians inserted a clause into the 2003 agreement specifying that the new entity was not to act contrary to their constitution or to the objective of fostering integration with the European Union.

65 Uzbekistan, an original party to the treaty (which was signed in its capital city), withdrew from it in 1999, as did Azerbaijan and Georgia, which had joined in 1993. Uzbekistan was to rejoin in 2006, only to pull out again in 2012.

66 Martha Brill Olcott, Anders Aslund and Sherman W. Garnett, Getting It Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), pp. 95–6.

67 The eight working groups, for example, largely limited themselves to one annual meeting each, often on the margins of larger gatherings. A number of agreements were never implemented, and others went into effect in only one or several of the member states. Details on the GUAM organisation can be found at http://guam-organization.org/ and more lucidly at a site maintained by one of the GUAM principals, Moldova: http://www.mfa.gov.md/about-guam-en/.

68 Olcott, Aslund and Garnett, Getting It Wrong, p. 208.

69 Jakob Tolstrup, Russia vs. the EU: The Competition for Influence in Post-Soviet States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013), p. 130.

70 Authors’ interview with a former senior Russian official, December 2015.

71 For Brzezinski's initial statement to this effect, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘The Premature Partnership’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 2, March–April 1994, pp. 67–82.

72 Warren Christopher, ‘NATO PLUS’, Washington Post, 9 January 1994, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1994/01/09/nato-plus/88b3d1a6-8111-4491-bbf0-e6267b0dae95/?utm_term=.0fe94b86f2ed.

73 William H. Hill, Russia, the Near Abroad, and the West: Lessons from the Moldova– Transdniestria Conflict (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012), p. 36.

74 Ronald Asmus of the RAND Corporation, who would shortly join the Clinton administration, wrote with two fellow enlargement advocates in 1995 that for the time being, ‘The West would prefer to have a Finlandised Ukraine – politically and economically stable and pro-Western, but militarily neutral’. Ronald D. Asmus, Richard L. Kugler and F. Stephen Larrabee, ‘NATO Expansion: The Next Steps’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 7–33.

75 Primakov, Vstrechi na perekrestkakh, p. 371.

76 Steve LeVine, The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 215.

77 Ibid., p. 221. Russian calculations are well laid out in Douglas W. Blum, ‘The Russian–Georgian Crisis and Baku– Tbilisi–Ceyhan’, PONARS Policy Memo, no. 252, October 2002, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/sites/default/files/policy-memos-pdf/pm_0252.pdf.

78 Mark Kramer, ‘Ukraine, Russia, and US Policy’, PONARS Policy Memo, no. 91, April 2001, https://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/ponars/pm_0191.pdf.

79 James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia After the Cold War (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), p. 118.

80 ‘BBC Breakfast with Frost, Interview: Vladimir Putin’, 5 March 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/breakfast_with_frost/transcripts/putin5.mar.txt.

81 Robyn Dixon, ‘With NATO Chief’s Visit to Russia, a Thaw Begins’, Los Angeles Times, 17 February 2000, http://articles.latimes.com/2000/feb/17/news/mn-65412.

82 Authors’ interview with a former senior Russian official, May 2016.

83 Hill, Russia, the Near Abroad, and the West, p. 39.

84 Online records note expenditures on GUAM/GUUAM in fiscal years 2001 and 2002, without giving exact numbers. There is no annotation for 2003, but in fiscal year 2004 there are entries of US$250,000 through Department of State accounts and US$520,000 through the Department of Homeland Security. The 2002 framework agreement can be found at http://guam-organization.org/en/node/461.

85 Hill, Russia, the Near Abroad, and the West, p. xii.

86 ‘Vystuplenie na konferentsii Memorial’nogo fonda Dzhavakharlala Neru', 3 December 2004, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22720.